Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

She made a lot of trips to the pencil sharpener in the basement because it said BOSTON on it.

At one point in her life she thought about running for mayor of the town, but didn’t want to embarrass Ray.

She sang hymns loudly, which embarrassed me.

She was an expert on drawing horses, especially their rear ends. She’d doodle horses’ asses all over the phone book.

She approached life happily, with her arms open. Which could have been a mistake.

She loved white frilly curtains, or yellow ones if they were super bright.

My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things.

I have a recurring mental image of her. When I was about twelve Trudie decided to learn how to ride my first, second and third cousin Jerry’s motorcycle. He brought it over to our place and he showed her how to sit on it and start it and rev it up and where the brakes were and all that stuff and she said okay, yup, got it, got it, got it. She told me and Tash not to tell Ray because he’d worry. We sat in the grass next to the driveway eating home-made popsicles and watching. Sunlight was flashing off the chrome of the motorcycle and my mom was laughing. She was wearing fake denim pedal pushers and a pink terry-towel T-shirt. She’d wave to us and make faces while Jerry was giving her instructions. So then finally Jerry said okay, time to put this on. He plopped this giant helmet onto her head and she gave us this fake helpless look. Then it was time for her to ride.

She kicked the stand back and then she slowly turned the motorcycle around so that she was facing the highway. She looked at Jerry and he nodded, huge grin on his face, and she took off. She shot off. I mean, she went from zero to sixty in about a second and then she careened off the driveway and onto the grass, hit a flowerpot and went flying over the handlebars. The thing that I keep remembering, though, is how she looked as she flew through the air. She stayed in the exact same sitting position that she’d been in on the motorcycle. Her legs were curved and spread a bit as though she were still straddling the thing and her arms and hands, the entire time that she was flying through the air, looked like they were still holding on to the handlebars. She looked like Evel Knievel jumping twenty cars or whatever but with an invisible motorcycle. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. It seemed to last forever.

And then we were all up and running over to her where she lay in the grass, still laughing, and moaning, and Jerry felt awful and Trudie made us promise not to tell Ray which was difficult later on when he came home and wondered how she got that cast on her arm. She told him she’d fallen down the stairs running for the rinse cycle with a cup of softener in her hand and Tash told him the truth but made him promise not to tell her he knew.

It’s not really a great or dignified recurring image to have of one’s absent mother, I guess, but I get a little thrill from the memory of her flying through the air in that odd phantom position. Later on that summer, when the cast was off, Trudie took me and Tash to the pits for a swim and she told us to go underwater and keep our eyes open. She told us that she was going to do a dive off this piece of board somebody had rigged up and that when we’d see her come under the water she’d be in a perfect frog position. And it was true. She looked exactly like a frog diving underwater.

That’s another strong image I have of Trudie but not as strong as the one where she flies. The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad’s laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn’t. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad’s bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother’s black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.

Imet Travis five months ago at a New Year’s Eve party at Suicide Hill. Good Mennonites don’t technically celebrate the arrival of yet another year of being imprisoned in this world. It’s a frustrating night for them. But we weren’t good Mennonites.

Somebody had made a big fire and sparks were flying around nicely and people were laughing and coughing. Some were necking in the bushes. A few others were playing flashlight tag in the old Russian cemetery next to the hill. One or two were vomiting in the snow and I could vaguely hear Christine McVie singing “Oh Daddy” from someone’s car speaker. I was standing around with some girls from school talking about resolutions when Travis and this other guy, Regan, walked up to us and asked if they could smoke us up.

We all shrugged, non-committal, flipped our hair, bored to death. Enh, said Janine, the verbal one. After sharing the joint me and Travis started a conversation and the other people went over to the fire. You’re Tash’s sister, right, he asked.

I said yeah.

That’s bullshit, man, he said, referring I think to Tash not being around any more.

I shrugged.

You smell like patchouli, he said.

I smiled. We smoked. We looked up at the stars. We shook from cold.

What’s your name again, he asked.

Nomi, I said.

He was wearing an army jacket with lots of pockets, and Greb Kodiaks. He’d cut the fingers off his gloves.

You like reggae, right, he asked.

Kinda, I said. Some of it. And he said he did too. And then we just started talking about music because that was sort of the test of potential. Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly. And then somehow Travis mentioned the name of Lou Reed without acting like a fawning dork about it and I knew then that I wanted to be his girlfriend so I stopped talking for a while and tried to act demure by keeping my lips a certain way.

Be mysterious, I told myself. I’d been going after that laughing-on-the-outside, crying-on-the-inside look for a while. It all had to do with the eyes and the mouth and certain pauses in your speech. It’s kind of tragic and romantic. I wasn’t very good at it but I liked the bullshit bravado of it, you know, the effort of trying to cover something up and show it at the same time.

You said Nomi, right, asked Travis. Yeah, I said, and your name again? Travis, he said. Right. Travis, Travis, I said, making a big exaggerated point of trying to remember. I’d known his name for years. After that we slowly walked towards the bushes and into this little clearing and then we sat down on a fallen tree and his arms were around me and he said talk to me, Nomi, so I started stupidly rambling on and on about the first thing that came to my mind.

I heard something once that I liked and I think about it a lot, I said.

Yeah? said Travis. What did you hear?

Well, I said, these two people, a guy and a girl, were standing on a dark street in some town somewhere and the girl really liked the guy and had thought about him all the time, about being with him, having a relationship, everything, and the guy, I don’t know, he might have liked the girl, he was a little older and way cooler, and they just happened to meet each other on the street around ten at night, both of them on their way home from somewhere, and the boy said to the girl, hey, hi, how’s it going, you’re uh…and the girl said uh, yeah, hey, and the guy said so talk to me, and the girl paused and smiled and then she said but you’re here. So, I said to Travis, like I had just concluded a lecture on the makings of the A-bomb or something. Do you know what I mean? He said yeah, yeah, he did. He asked me why I liked that and I said I didn’t know, it seemed emblematic of something or other, and he said but he was there and I was talking to him and I said yeah, that was true.